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Thomas Perkins

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JILA and NRC postdoc Dr. David Jacobson was awarded the American Physical Society’s 2017 Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Biological Physics. The thesis prize is awarded for outstanding quality and achievement in any area of experimental, computational, engineering, or theoretical biological physics. While JILA has had great success with the APS Award for Outstanding Doctoral...

Fellow Tom Perkins has won a 2017 Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research. Perkins will receive the award from Governor John Hickenlooper at an event sponsored by the CO-LABS consortium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on October 5, 2017. This year’s ninth annual event will honor Colorado’s top scientists and engineers for projects having a significant impact on society.

The Perkins group has made dramatic advances in the use of Atomic Force Microscopes (AFMs) to study large single biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids (DNA, RNA), that are important for life. After previously improving AFM measurements of biomolecules by orders of magnitude for stability, sensitivity and time response, the Perkins group has now developed ways to make these precision...

The Perkins group continues to extend the performance of its unique Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) technology, revealing for the first time a dozen new short-lived intermediate states in the folding and unfolding of a membrane protein that controls the exchange of chemicals and ions into and out of living cells. Measuring the energetics and dynamics of membrane proteins is crucial to...

The Perkins Group has demonstrated a 50-to-100 times improvement in the time resolution for studying the details of protein folding and unfolding on a commercial Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). This enhanced real time probing of protein folding is revealing details in these complex processes never seen before. This substantial enhancement in AFM force spectroscopy may one day have powerful...

JILA graduate students Stephen Okoniewski (Perkins group), Jake Pettine (Nesbitt group), and Lindsay Sonderhouse (Ye group) have won coveted 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, NSF announced March 31. The five-year Graduate Research Fellowships provide three years of support, with a per-year stipend of $34,000 and cost of education allowance of $12,000. Tuition and...

NRC post-doc Rob Walder has won a “Best Poster” award at the Single Molecule Approaches to Biology Gordon Research Conference in Italy for his poster entitled “An Ultrastable Platform for Single Molecule Measurements: Sub-Nanometer Drift in 3D for Hours.” Walder works with the Perkins group.

Thomas Perkins received the 2013 Arthur S. Flemming Award at a Washington, D. C., ceremony on June 9. The award was one of 12 given this year to honor outstanding Federal employees in their first 15 years of Federal service. Dr. David Bray, Chief Information Officer for the Federal Communications Commission and a 2012 Flemming Award winner, was the keynote speaker at the event.

Fellow Tom Perkins’ group is significantly closer to realizing its long-standing dream of using atomic force microscopy (AFM) to study how membrane proteins fold and unfold. Historically, scientists have used AFM to measure the mechanical forces needed to unfold individual proteins and the resulting increase in their lengths. However, the limitations of AFM itself have prevented researchers...

The groups of Fellow Adjoint Markus Raschke and Fellow Tom Perkins joined forces recently to shine light onto a bacterial membrane protein called bacteriorhodopsin (bR). They used a new infrared (IR) light imaging system with a spatial resolution and chemical sensitivity of just a few bR molecules. In their experiment, the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) acted like an antenna for the...

Gold glitters because it is highly reflective, a quality once considered important for precision measurements made with gold-coated probes in atomic force microscopy (AFM). In reality, the usual gold coating on AFM probes is a major cause of force instability and measurement imprecision, according to research done by the Perkins group. The group has shown that gold-coated probes are a...

JILA experiment shows nicks and free ends are not required for DNA overstretching

In science, it can be fun and interesting to upend conventional wisdom. A good example is what just happened to a widely accepted explanation for overstretching of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA). Overstretching occurs suddenly when researchers add a tiny increment of force to dsDNA that is already...

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) just got a whole lot more efficient for studying proteins and other biomolecules. Graduate student Allison Churnside, former research associate Gavin King, and Fellow Tom Perkins recently used a laser to detect the position of sparsely distributed biomolecules on a glass cover slip. Since the same laser is also used to locate the AFM tip, it is now possible to...

The most important step for a microscope wanting to marry another microscope is finding the right partner. A professional matchmaker, such as the Perkins lab, might be just the ticket. The group recently presided over the nuptials of atomic force microscopy and optical-trapping microscopy. Research associate Gavin King, graduate students Ashley Carter and Allison Churnside, CU freshman...

The Perkins group is helping to develop DNA as a force standard for the nano world. Polymers of DNA act like springs, and DNA's elasticity may one day provide a force standard from 0.1–10 piconewtons (pN). One pN is the force exerted when 1 mW of light reflects off a mirror or the approximate weight of one hundred E. coli cells. DNA is an excellent candidate for a force standard...

Life can be challenging on the biophysics research frontier. Consider gold nanoparticles as a research tool, for example. Gold is ductile and malleable as well as being a good conductor of heat and electricity. Its unique chemistry allows proteins and DNA to be easily attached to these nanoparticles. Physicists have been investigating gold nanoparticles in optical-trapping experiments...

Lora Nugent-Glandorf and Tom Perkins have come up with an optical trap motion detector that can "see" protein motors moving one base at a time along a DNA helix. For some time scientists have been able to make optical traps that can track the movement of attached beads, but the method had a resolution of 1-2 nanometers, which was not sensitive enough to resolve .338 nm DNA base...

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